Mike Turitzin

(Wrapped diffuse just remaps the range of the N-dot-L term so some of the negative range maps to positive. Using [-0.4, 1.0] -> [0.0, 1.0] here.)

Obviously this has issues, but leaving it in for now.

/end

Experimenting with "wrapped diffuse" for my point lights while I don't have global-illumination.

Seems to work decently in caves to "warm up" the vicinity of the light.

1/

Broad-phase tests use AABBs, narrow-phase can use many shape types.

Sure, I am also using my own custom thing for SDF edits, in part because I need a format that's easy to transfer to the GPU.

Non-simulated objects can be put in a separate broad-phase layer, so there is zero impact on physics sim performance.

An underrated use of physics engines is as a spatial "database" for game objects, even ones that aren't part of the physics sim.

Currently using Jolt for this - get high-perf spatial queries of various types, both broad-phase and narrow-phase, multithreaded updates, etc.

I have played it a bit, and liked a number of things! Having temporary lights like that is interesting - for now I'm leaning toward lights that are "permanent" but I could experiment with other ways of placing them.

I will accept that comparison, but the gameplay I have planned is actually very different from Minecraft!

This is the most minimal possible implementation of point lights, actually - every one is evaluated per-pixel during deferred shading!

So very soon I'm going to need to implement tiled/clustered shading so only relevant lights are evaluated for each pixel.

You can now place lights while digging deep into the ground in my game. The plan is to have lights be a resource that must be conserved.

Given there are no shadows for these lights right now (much less GI), this is already looking better than I was expecting.

[cont]

YouTube video by daivuk How I made a shooter game in 64 KB

Highly recommend this video, which is a super deep dive into the techniques used to create a 64kb demoscene-style '90s FPS:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qht6...

Humorously, while my SDF engine has gotten pretty sophisticated, I still had not added any way of rendering normal triangle meshes.

So I'm adding that now (loading a subset of glTF), trying to do the bare minimum with regard to materials, batching, instancing, etc.

It's possible, and I've thought about it a bit, but it would be a big project and probably won't be something I ship in the current game I'm making.

Thanks, yeah I have thought this could look pretty cool with transparency/refraction, maybe will mess with that at some point!

I built a sculpture for Burning Man.

Getting this to work was just some plumbing, but I was putting it off before some work to reduce the footprint of cached material values.

Just decided to punt on that for now - thus, +25% VRAM usage for SDF surface cache.

Metallic materials are now officially supported in my engine.

Previously, I hacked this for some videos by interpreting inverse "roughness" as "metallic", but obviously that isn't a great long-term solution :)

Appreciate the offer but I am keeping it a solo dev project for a while at least

Thanks! Well, I am making a game with it so it won't be a public thing

I just keep using that shiny reddish material, don't I

Yeah, definitely a lot more to do in terms of visuals / game feel!

Destruction physics aren't something I have now, and are likely out of scope for this project, but definitely something I'd like to explore more.

Definitely a reference point for me :)

The beginnings of prototyping digging/mining gameplay.

Resources are embedded in the ground and are dislodged when the surface is cut away. They're placed in colored regions that reveal their proximity.

Lots of different directions to go with this, continuing to experiment!

The Road to Substance Modeler: VR Roots, Desktop Reinvention I volunteered to join the  Substance Modeler   team less than a year after it came to Adobe, from Oculus. The team was really strong, and it...

This article is a great technical overview of the workings of Adobe Substance 3D Modeler (which I originally remember as Oculus Medium!)

There are many parallels to what I'm doing in my engine, though obviously this is a very different application.

dakrunch.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-...

Yup, exactly!

Thanks! So one thing that might be unclear with my visualizations is that each "brick" shown is actually itself an 8x8x8 grid. So the resolution is 8x more detailed in each dimension than it may appear!

I think there is a lot of possibility (though also moral hazards) for creating assets via AI techniques and then using them in a game engine. My main doubt is whether a "world model" is a good substrate for a game.

Fixed the way I apply materials for SDF subtractions.

My previous approach is common in shaders, but causes problems for future edits that use a material alpha<1.0 (the 1st subtraction material will extend infinitely into the surface).

Looks like a nice crunchy candy coating :)

As many have pointed out, consistency, rules, mechanics, etc. are core to games.

It seems like a lot of people think "games" when they see generative AI video "world models."

What I think of is something a lot more like a Holodeck (Star Trek), where environments and experiences can be summoned, but everything is "squishy" in a way that games are not.